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Monday, 23 November 2009

iron or...

In Saturday’s Guardian Simon Hoggart commented, not for the first time, on Gordon Brown’s “strange pronunciations”.

The prime minister has been making much of the Conservative party leader David Cameron's "cast-iron" promise, now abandoned, of a referendum on the Lisbon treaty.…It's rather spoiled, though, by the fact that he seems to be the only person in the English-speaking world who pronounces the letter "r" in "iron", thus: "cast eye-ron promise." It brings you up short and makes it hard to concentrate on what follows.

Gordon Brown is of course far from being ‘the only person in the English-speaking world who pronounces the letter “r” in “iron”’. All rhotic speakers do.What is unusual about Brown’s pronunciation, as Simon Hoggart says, is that he pronounces the word as spelt, i-ronˈaɪ rən. So for him it rhymes with Byron and involves the same sequence as tyrant. The usual pronunciation of iron, ˈaɪə(r)n, must result from a historical metathesis by which ī rən becomes ī ərn. The r then as usual coalesces with the preceding schwa in rhotic accents to yield ɚ, ˈaɪɚn, while in non-rhotic accents, being preconsonantal, it undergoes the usual deletion, giving ˈaɪən. The OED gives a rather more elaborate account, involving “diphthongation” (by which I think it means the Great Vowel Shift) and “syncopation”, but saying essentially the same thing.I don’t know whether Brown’s pronunciation of this word is shared by some or all Scots. Perhaps someone will tell us. It does have the advantage of making the word clearly distinct from ion.

It looks to me as if your hypothesis is not essentially the same as the OED one but completely different from it. The OED says that the “diphthongation” of the Great Vowel Shift appears to have happened before the “syncopation”, i.e. the dropping of the second syllable:

"In the standard Eng. īren, īron, syncopation app. did not take place until after diphthongation of the ī, whence through a phonetic series (ˈiːrən), (ˈaɪrən), (ˈaɪərən), (ˈaɪər(ə)n), (ˈaɪə(r)n), came the existing (ˈaɪən); cf. the syncopated pa. pples. born, borne, torn, worn, boln, swoln, and Sc. fal'n, fawn, from earlier boren, toren, woren, bollen, swollen, fallen. The 15-16th c. dial. spellings iern, yern, yirn, are ambiguous: in some cases they may have meant (ˈiːərn), (ˈaɪərn), in others yern, (jərn); the latter prob. from Norse jarn, Da. jern."

They appear to think (ˈaɪən) still needs a stress mark, and they don’t have one on 'ire' or anything, but that's hardly likely to be a gesture in the direction of endorsing Gord's disyllabicity – probably just an oversight.

And the reference to the ambiguity of the 15-16th c. dial. spellings iern, yern, yirn does sort of hedge their bets about the sequence of events.

I of course meant JW's hypothesis is not "essentially the same" as the OED's, not any hypothesis of yours, Leo.

Missed your post because I was locked in mortal ˈkɒmbæt (see discussion of HMQ's pronunciation of that on 'royal enhancement') with the task of converting the OED's grubby graphics to make them legible!

Thank you Ed. I knew I'd heard non-Sc northerners use the form. In fact I can hardly believe the restricted geographics of the SED on this.

JHJ, so does mine (1993). BTW I should have made it clear that the only pronunciation given for the entry itself was also (ˈaɪən). It does look a bit as tho there's some sort of feeling around that this should be a disyllable, doesn’t it?

VP: Sorry, it probably wasn't a very helpful comment for me to make. I'm just surprised that the author of a book called "America: A User's Guide" apparently hasn't noticed rhotic accents. I find the man annoying.

I think it means he can spell, and is familiar with the spelling, but has never understood the word any better than the answer he so readily gives.

Spot on, vp! And I think we may assume that's not an eye pun! OED's date of 1613 for Henry IV part ii is claimed elsewhere to be too late, but it's everywhere apparent in Shakespeare that the Great Vowel Shift was in full spate, so this evidence of əirən or whatever vindicates OED's argument that the syncopation did not take place until after diphthongation of the ī.

DCF, do you have aɪ for I and ɛi for eye? Or can you give us any other minimal pairs? Other northern dialects have this opposition.

And Leo, why would your comment be unhelpful? Hoggart's ignorance is deeply shocking. He needs to be reading User's Guides, not writing them.

You point out that the flak deflected from JW Doesn't say where the r in iron goes, but the interesting thing for me is that the writer apparently can't imagine it going anywhere else:

'all Scots pronounce the "r" in iron. I'd like to know why not to pronounce it when it's there?'

In my first comment on this blog I only said Brown’s pronunciation was shared by "an awful lot of Scots", but this has given me more confidence that all of them not only pronounce the "r" but parallel his pronunciation with respect to its position as well.

Hmm. I imagine that all rhotic speakers would appeal to the fact that the r is "there", even those who say 'aɪərn. But the fact that the writer doesn't criticise 'aɪrən does suggest that he's happy to attribute it to all Scots.

I haven't heard enough Scots to judge! There might be some clips of Neil Oliver saying it though - he covers Scotland's Iron Age history, doesn't he?

Yes Leo, I realized you imagined that all rhotic speakers would appeal to the fact that the r is "there", even those who say 'aɪərn. But it's not just that the writer doesn't criticise 'aɪrən – Hoggart was making a big fuss about the "place and manner" of its pronunciation (i.e. as in "eye-ron"):

'the only person in the English-speaking world who pronounces the letter "r" in "iron", thus: "cast eye-ron promise."'

And the flakker protests that not only do all Scots pronounce the "r" in iron, but that he'd like to know why not to pronounce it when it's there. (i.e. where it is!) The more I think about it the more I think my earlier observation that "the writer apparently can't imagine it going anywhere else" was too diffident – it simply doesn’t occur to him that anyone else could imagine that his protest wasn’t a full endorsement of the full eye-ron!

– There might be some clips of Neil Oliver saying it.

But he's straight out of Monty Python! I wouldn’t be able to stick it even long enough to catch a specimen!

Andrew, you are scrupulously circumspect in only reporting your own pronunciation. But I guess you have heard other Scots say [aɪərn]. Is it as unusual as I think? Could you be one of those near-RP dialect speakers we have been talking about, like Andrew Marr, for example?

"I don't think anyone ever called me on it, though."People are usually too polite to call non-native speakers on weird stuff (at least here in Italy -- YMMV). I had a professor from Poland who told us of when he used to say "gravidanza" (pregnancy) when he meant "gravità" (gravity), and to wonder why people would look at him amusedly. Nobody had explained that to him until years later.

I just searched YouTube for "Neil Oliver". That clip actually comes higher up the search list than the real Neil. No idea who it is - everyone's a performer these days. And being the most Scottish man in the world, he's an obvious choice for impressionists.

By the way, my dad reports "eye-ron" for Scots (sorry, I can't get the IPA to work) and specifies an actual trilled [r] for the "really hardcore". Although I gues Groundskeeper Willie could have told you that.

As another non-native, I was taught explicitly that (and how) the spelling is misleading, and went on to interpret the -ro- part like the -re of BrE theatre, centre and so on, that is, as [ɐ ~ ə], in an attempt to line up the spelling with the pronunciation in some way.

The only problem is I would have extended it to Byron till a few minutes ago. Fortunately I never had to pronounce that name, I think.

Yes I knew you were. I get the impression you read "I take that to be a serious question" as "I don't take that to be a serious question"! I assure you I too have heard Germans as well as Reepubcans pronounce the relevant part as [aɪən], [ˈaɪɚn] etc., but [ˈaɪɚn]etc. are more probably because of JW's metathesis (see the above blog entry) than by analogy, I think.

The tehr-rist thing made me think you used irony (NPI). (By the way, that had been a bit unfair, I probly drop lots of sylbles mself, and I don't usually mind a Texan accent. But Dubbya brought out the worst in us.)

"Many, many cross Scottish readers have written in to say that's how it's said north of the border, and that it is a perfectly valid pronunciation, you English bigot.

Well, no. Scots do pronounce the "r" but it's a soft, almost imperceptible rolled "r", sounding, if anything, like "I-urn". The prime minister says "eye-ron", two distinct syllables, as if Ron Atkinson was starting to take the oath."